Job Market Paper

Committee members: Margaret Christ (chair), Shane Dikolli, Jacqueline Hammersley, Jessica Rodell, and Kristy Towry

ABSTRACT: I examine whether firms can cultivate employee curiosity using informal controls—specifically, stated organizational values and leader role modeling—and how curiosity, in turn, influences creative performance. Nearly half of surveyed organizations report wanting more curious employees. Yet, executives' beliefs about curiosity are ambivalent: 90% believe it enhances performance, but 50% simultaneously regard it as an impediment. Using an experiment, I find that stated values reliably and significantly increase curiosity, while the effects of leader role modeling are more nuanced. I also find that curiosity expressed in a setting unrelated to performance significantly improves creative performance by increasing the number of ideas that are both effective and uncommon. This improvement appears to arise from curiosity prompting deeper engagement with the problem space (yielding more effective ideas) and fostering more flexible and fluent thinking (yielding more uncommon ideas). These findings contribute to research on the antecedents of creativity and offer insight into how firms can shape the cognitive conditions for creative work through informal control systems, rather than relying solely on formal mechanisms such as incentives.

Revising for 2nd round submission to The Accounting Review

with Tina Carpenter and Margaret Christ

ABSTRACT: The traditional apprenticeship model, characterized by a top-down flow of knowledge from experienced auditors to their less experienced counterparts, may implicitly discourage upward knowledge sharing. However, in today’s technology-focused environment, there is great potential for upward knowledge sharing as audits are increasingly reliant on technology knowledge which does not necessarily accrue with auditor tenure and is thus likely held more with junior auditors than supervisor auditors. Through interviews, we explore factors that enhance and inhibit junior auditors’ upward knowledge sharing. Using social status theory as a lens for understanding our data, three themes emerge. First, audit quality is enhanced when audit teams blend technology acumen, more prevalent among junior auditors, with senior auditors' deep accounting expertise. Second, there are roadblocks and conflicts that inhibit junior auditors from sharing knowledge upwards. Finally, while roadblocks exist, champions emerge on successful teams to pave the way for upward knowledge sharing ultimately enhancing audit quality.

Working Paper

with Tina Carpenter, Margaret Christ, and Emily Deng

ABSTRACT: Knowledge sharing is a powerful component of organizational success.  However, in a hierarchical structure, a supervisor’s resistance to receiving knowledge from their subordinates can stifle knowledge sharing, negatively impacting organizations’ performance. Overcoming the deeply ingrained power imbalance resulting from hierarchy is essential for facilitating effective knowledge sharing and fully leveraging the team's diverse expertise and perspectives. Accordingly, we use an experiment to explore upward knowledge sharing within the supervisor-subordinate relationship and examine how supervisors respond when they receive knowledge shared from their subordinate. We draw on power dependency theory to predict and find that supervisors respond more negatively to upward knowledge sharing when they have overlapping expertise with their subordinates. However, we also provide good news in that we find that when supervisors who have overlapping expertise receive subordinate-contingent incentives (i.e., those dependent on subordinates’ performance), rather than incentives only linked to their individual performance, they respond more positively to upward knowledge sharing when evaluating their subordinates’ performance. In contrast, we find that supervisors who have overlapping expertise and individual incentives effectively punish their subordinates with lower performance ratings for sharing knowledge upward. Finally, we predict and find that subordinates condition their choice to share knowledge upward based on their supervisor’s reaction, highlighting the importance of the supervisor’s behavior in shaping collaboration within the team.

Working Paper

with Henry Eyring and Patrick J. Ferguson

ABSTRACT: We study the role of ‘cooling off’ after receipt of relative performance information (RPI) as a means of altering RPI’s performance effects. On one hand, cooling off may dissipate people’s immediate and potent affective response to feedback. This could decrease motivation and effort, thereby lowering the positive performance effects of RPI. On the other hand, cooling off may allow people to reflect and respond more deliberately to feedback. This could facilitate learning and effective allocation of effort, thereby enhancing the positive performance effects of RPI. Using a field experiment in an online education setting, we find support for the latter: RPI on average boosts academic grades, and this benefit is significantly larger for those students whom we expose to design friction that makes cooling off between receiving RPI and subsequent action more likely. Students exposed to the design friction and those who are not take a similar number of actions, but those exposed are significantly more accurate in their problem attempts. Our evidence suggests that this benefit stems from the cooling off period following receipt of RPI, which enables these students to allocate effort more productively and identify best practices that bring about more effective performance. In cross-sectional analyses, we find that the benefits of cooling off are concentrated among low-performing men. Our findings extend research on the performance effects of RPI and illustrate how behavioral economic theory on design frictions can improve the design of feedback systems. 

Work in Progress

with Henry Eyring

People consistently exhibit time-inconsistent preferences, a phenomenon known as hyperbolic discounting. Prior studies have explored interventions to align current and future preferences, but extant empirical research relies on the assumption that future preferences are time-consistent—meaning that future utility at any future point is weighed equally. We relax that assumption by introducing multiple future time points, allowing future preferences to vary across different time horizons. We examine whether directing attention to specific points on the hyperbolic discounting curve—representing specific time horizons—is more or less effective at shifting current behavior to align with future preferences.

Work in Progress

with Jasmijn Bol, Margaret Christ, and Kaitlin Hudspeth

Employees are frequently compared to their peers as if they work under identical conditions. A common tool for enabling such comparisons is relative performance information (RPI), which provides employees with feedback about how their performance ranks relative to others. While RPI can be a powerful motivational tool, most laboratory research assumes a level playing field—an environment in which all employees have equal access to resources, opportunities, and conditions that affect performance, such as task difficulty, available support, and workload. In this study, we relax that assumption to examine the efficacy of RPI when employees face differing task conditions. Specifically, we test whether RPI backfires when performance comparisons occur in a setting marked by task heterogeneity. We also explore whether redesigning RPI to emphasize relative target achievement—rather than absolute performance rankings—can help preserve its motivational value in environments where conditions are perceived as unequal.

Work in Progress

with Margaret Christ, Marcy Shepardson, and Tamara Lambert

Echo chambers are increasingly prevalent, driven in large part by social media algorithms that curate belief-consistent information streams and limit exposure to opposing viewpoints. While the influence of such environments on political and social attitudes has been widely studied, far less is known about their impact on professional decision-making contexts. In particular, it remains unclear how repeated exposure to belief-reinforcing information may shape auditors' professional skepticism, risk assessments, and overall judgment quality. Understanding this relationship is important because auditors must maintain objectivity and resist biases that could compromise the integrity of their evaluations.